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Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

reuters.com

251–260 of 410 posts

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#252
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your last line is the super important point, occurred to me today as well. If we beat this thing with social distancing, idiots will say "See! There was no reason to panic!"

At my work people are ridiculing the serious response and extreme measure by countries. They boasted about buying now cheap tickets to fly on vacation instead of "suffering through" home office as ordered by our company. These are educated people. Doesn't seem to save them from ignorance though, as they are on the "just a flu" train.

Smart people to be sure. The global hysteria for a simple flu is mind boggling.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#253
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you could also say that for people 80 and above, this epidemic will more than double their already significant chances of dying this year...

That's a really hard thing to say this early. For all we know many 80+ people are asymptomatic and most older people aren't negatively affected at all by covid 19. It seems really dangerous to conflate actual mortality rate with mortality rate among the confirmed cases. Those numbers will be drastically different with diseases that have many asymptomatic carriers.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-se...

80+ age category has a 21.9% death rate in confirmed cases.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#254
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan has a lot of intensive care units. I guess it comes with having a generally older population.

but not compared to other developed countries (except England): [1] [2] Germany 3.7 24.6 France 3.3 9.3 England 2.7 3.3 USA 2.4 20 Canada 2.4 13.5 Japan 2.2 4 to 5 1. Ratio of physicians to patients (per 1,000 population) 2. Number of ICU beds (per 100,000 population)

Do you have a source for those numbers? They differ significantly from https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=30183, but perhaps your source is more reliable.

Edit: nevermind, I misunderstood the definition of "Curative care (acute care) beds in hospitals".

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#255

This outbreak is a litmus test for the competence of countries. It's already shone a bright light on the fragility of global supply lines, cheap travel and open borders. These are the aspects of life most likely to change after this is all over.

IMHO one consequence will be death of neoliberalism (started with Reagan/Thatcher but going philosophically to Hayek and Friedman). It is quite likely that U.S. will nationalize health care as a response to this crisis. But more broadly, the idea that government is a useless economic actor and shouldn't dictate economic policy will become laughable in the response to the crisis.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#256
post #72
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3.65% / 1.75% ~ 2.09, so the difference in age profile might explain a factor 2 in the mortality ratio of Italy vs South Korea. The actual ratio is currently 7.9: 827 out of 12462 cases in Italy (6.6%), 66 out of 7869 cases in South Korea (0.84%).

The infection in Italy started in hospital or in retirement home (I don't remember which), so the first infected were people > 70. In South Korea it started in a cult, where most people were young And the rest was South Korean lack of regard for privacy (they have a map for each case where you can trace where and when a given infected person was - so you can check if you were near him/her) and technological superiori…

[deleted]

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#257
post #26

Italy has an older population, hence more susceptible to deaths and spreading of the virus: - Average age of death due to Coronavirus in Italy is 82 [1] - In Italy, 3.65% of the population is 80 or older [2]. - In Korea, 1.75% of the population is 80 or older [3] [1] https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/covid-19... [2] https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2019/ [3] https://www.populationpyramid.net/…

3.65% / 1.75% ~ 2.09, so the difference in age profile might explain a factor 2 in the mortality ratio of Italy vs South Korea. The actual ratio is currently 7.9: 827 out of 12462 cases in Italy (6.6%), 66 out of 7869 cases in South Korea (0.84%).

Please don't conflate case fatality rate with actual fatality rate. South Korea has almost certainly just had more time and "medical bandwidth" to find more of the minor and asymptomatic infections that make up potentially 80%+ of the total, and turn them into cases by diagnosing them.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#258
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my jiu jitsu club, we're moving into no-contact grappling. This will keep us safe from the virus yet give those in quarantine some much-needed mental relief. See e.g. https://streamable.com/loz3v . Don't do that outdoors though, unless you can find ways to avoid the injuries from no-contact grappling on hard surfaces.

That might be saf er than full contact, but hardly seems safe . Well within cough/sneeze range.

We're not actually doing that of course, all training is canceled.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#259
post #5

Just curious, does anybody know how did Japan manage to do so well, inspite of a very old population. Also what does HN think is the better place to be right now? A mega city or a small village?

Information gap, many of these countries can read Chinese.

Re: Italy and South Korea virus outbreaks reveal disparity in deaths and tactics

#260
post #218
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the worst hit region in Italy (Lombardy) confirmed covid 19 cases represent enough cases to take up less than 10% of their hospital beds. Do you have a source for this comment? This WaPo story from 6 hours ago says differently: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/italy-coronaviru... > Giulio Gallera, Lombardy’s health chief, said Thursday that the region would reach its capacity in “five, six or seven da…

lombardy has 7280 confirmed cases [1] lombary has a population of 10MM (wikipedia) italy has 3.18 hospital beds per 1000 [2] the math for that adds up to 31,800 hospital beds 7280 confirmed cases is 22% - so my sources were off or wiki is wrong as originally I recall reading lombardy has a 16MM population. I will say that your article claims they haven't run out of ICU beds yet but that number is surprisingly high fo…

Most hospitals don't have all that much slack in bed capacity; especially at the tail end of flu season most of those beds are already filled. The hospitals may be extrapolating the growth rate of the disease and realizing how soon they will have problems. Or given the nature of the outbreak it could be that even within Lombardy there are areas with much higher concentrations of cases, like there are more cases, inc. per capita, in Wuhan than other cities in Hubei.

What's not plausible is ICU beds being taken up by people who don't have the disease (maybe miild-to-moderate flus or bad colds) and are just panicking. Emergency room lines, sure. Test shortages, absolutely. But hospitals will not put someone who's just scared and doesn't even need to be admitted at all into the ICU.

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